Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without reason or recourse
A few days ago, she opened the app to find the message,
> This account is not allowed to use WhatsApp > Chats are still on this device.
This didn't make any sense, as she only uses it to chat with family and friends and certainly hadn't broken any terms. Found the option to appeal and submitted that. A day later, the app now says
> This account cannot use WhatsApp > We've completed our review and found this account's activity goes against WhatsApp's terms of service
There's no way she's actually broken any terms, so it appears this is some kind of mistake, but given the speed of the "review", I doubt any human has actually looked at it. She's tried contacting them via their contact page, but given the review is already "complete", I'm not too hopeful.
Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam. Perhaps somehow all numbers in that group ended up associated with the spamming? Regardless, pretty frustrating situation since she has a couple of long-running chats with family and friend groups that she can no longer participate in. Always fun to be at the whims of the algorithm.
Posting in case there's anything to the connection between marking a message as spam and getting blocked (maybe it's safer to just mute spam messages instead), as well as on the off chance someone from Facebook ends up reading this and can help.
219 comments
[ 39.1 ms ] story [ 4581 ms ] threadHmm that's mildly concerning if that's the reason. My acquaintance got a similar spam message yesterday and they marked it as spam as well. No account closures yet though...
So a billion dollar company that locks out a user and does not correctly and quickly handle an appeal would get a giant fee that really hurts.
Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by nation states.
If my local barber tells me "don't come back here ever again", I'll find another barber within 15min walk from my place.
If Facebook bans me, I might lose a way to communicate with hundreds of people, I might lose access to managing my business and talk to my clients. And often there might be very few viable alternatives.
As Facebook and other large companies become dominant in certain areas, their responsibility should grow, too. And banning users based on some algorithmic detection, without the ability to contact human customer support to understand and fix the situation, should not be acceptable.
We can keep saying "uninstall WhatsApp/Messenger/WeChat!" but for a lot of people this it not viable, because it means cutting social connections or losing clients. There are countries like Spain where WhatsApp is the way to communicate on-line and few people use other IMs.
There are a few things that can change it - either a technology shift (e.g. mobile revolution ended Windows dominance), black swan event (like pandemic that moved everyone to hybrid/remote work), or government regulation. If we don't want the government to intervene, we need to accept that we might be randomly banned by an algorithm and there's nothing we can do about it.
There are alternatives. If we don't want Facebook in general to monopolize every aspect of our lives, we need to actively refuse being assimilated by the Borg and prioritize these alternatives.
Ok, your small online store is banned from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. What will you do?
Do you mean advertising or keeping an internet presence? If you mean "internet presence", I'd would use one of the numerous site builders and I would create a pixelfed and mastodon instances to publish content.
If you mean advertising: I'd write a post here about how my account was banned without justification...
You just need to stop contributing to it if you believe that it is harmful to you and you are okay with the consequences of your choices.
I am not walking around with a soapbox telling everyone they should leave FB and Instagram. Instead, I am simply not participating in it and hoping that this can serve as an example for others.
I would rather the company focusses innovation on the next big step rather than incrementally taking care of these few long-tail and corner cases.
Moreover, its the users who make a company big or small, if there are better options users would anyway migrate away - the comment sounds a bit entitled if I am being honest - you want a great product + great customer service, for free. (I don't buy the 'but i am giving them my personal data in return' argument)
Given the market value of the company, then it should be able to comply with basic standards of say decency, honesty and perhaps ... transparency.
The other argument is that the major messaging platforms have collectively become an essential basic utility, and accordingly carry some responsibility.
Taking on so many users means you get responsibilities to society that smaller companies don't get.
I've been asking friends to get off WhatsApp forever, and everyone wants to get off it. But family members and clients are on it, so now everyone downloads multiple messaging apps, ones they want to use and the ones they're forced go use.
At this point even if WhatsApp explicitly says they'll sell your information to Satan, people will still use it because it's free.
Crowing 'private company' doesn't absolve you of providing the functions of the town square when you've bulldozed and replaced it and repeatedly stated that you are the town square.
I made a new LLC recently and signed up for PayPal to pay an invoice.
I gave them my info, my tax ID, my bank account, etc.
And within five minutes, they told me that my account was permanently blocked and that I wouldn't be able to use PayPal with my business. No reason was given other than I must have violated their TOU.
I had to go onto Twitter and talk publicly about it, then talked to three different Twitter representatives over a three weeks period, and they finally unlocked my account.
I commend them for unlocking it, but it's certainly given me pause over using them for even sending funds. :(
I can see both sides of this process, and unfortunately, in case of an error, it's almost impossible to resolve the situation without an inside advocate who could influence the outcome and possibly correct the mistake.
This is why we need regulation that protects people/businesses.
The EU is working on it
God, just install that other app or pay for Texts or Beeper if you really need it.
So when you go to jail, do they tell you 'see the law'? No, they tell spesifically which law you broke.
If you are willing to accept this BS, how do you know they are telling the truth, what if you didn't break their TOS and the real reason they banned you is because they dislike your political views?
What if tomorrow they ban everyone who supports donald trump, or whatever.
My XMPP address will keep working as long as I have control over my DNS records.
There is no technology in the world that isn't vulnerable to this sort of thing. The only way out is legislating against companies cutting you off without reason or recourse.
Indeed! One has control on their DNS records only as long as they are allowed to have control on their DNS records. That control can be taken away as it once happened in my case when a domain name I was using was sinkholed due to a false positive. Full story here: https://susam.net/blog/sinkholed.html
Until the sinkhole incident happened, I was a firm believer of running my own email server with a domain name I have registered, so that it would not be possible for a large corporation to accidentally lock me out of my email. But now that I have seen how one's control over a domain name can be taken away suddenly and without warning, I am not so sure!
They are a monopoly that people are dependent on - it's not as if you can just choose not to use whatsapp. You cannot just move to another messaging app unless you get everyone on the planet to move with you.
I, for example, am required to use whatsapp every day for my job. If I was banned from whatsapp, I would be unable to do my job and be immediately fired.
Messaging is an essential utility now, and just like the other utilities in your house, it is not fair to cut people off from them.
Whatsapp doesn't have rights, they have responsibilities, and they should not be allowed to ban people for no reason.
I live fine without using any FB products
if your livelihood depends on a lame messaging app something is wrong with your business
Go out and meet some people whose families are on Whatsapp. Whose parents or grandparents know exactly how to use the one app and that's it.
I boycott LinkedIn and I have enough trouble as it is because of that. And it's LinkedIn, a lame-ass feel-good social network. WhatsApp is a messaging app and has over 2 billion users, with a penetration so large in some countries (especially Europe) that it gets special treatment for ISPs, it's often the only way to contact some businesses, and has de facto replaced SMS for many. There aren't "thousands of messaging apps" with that kind of userbase.
Pointless for you? Good for you. Your life is not others', though, please have empathy.
Do you live in a democratic country? It's up to you and your neighbors then!
Permaban for no reason, and fail to respond to appeals? A fine of 1 day of revenue, per user, seems reasonable to me.
(Revenue would include revenue of all controlled foreign subsidiaries, tax haven shell companies, etc, of course)
Do you see where your logic is failing?
Either have standard open protocols or be regulated.
If it would take a 3 person team one employee 10 minutes to resolve, then fine based on about a hundred thousandth of total gross revenue.
I purposefully avoided doing mobile development to stay away from Google and Apple and it looks like, for some years now, web apps are buttery smooth on any device.
If Apple and Google sorted things out message-wise (can't see this happening) we might get there, but then you're still left with the billions of people that have simpler phones that use whatsapp because that's all they can actually use (whatsapp became prolific because of its tiny J2ME roots on tiny cheap phones in 3rd world countries).
I guess I was trying to point out that you need to look at the bigger picture. How would you police a free service with hundreds of millions of users without a shitload of automation? How would you pick the "innocent" people out very very quickly by using a human to review, given there are probably hundreds of thousands of such requests a day? It's not an easy problem.
Really though, you'd probably change more actual minds (rather than just finding others who agree with your opinions already) on a literal soapbox.
I do agree that these platforms should have (mostly) been regulated out of existence long before the term "cancelled" was popular.
Have you been following politics since the 80s? I have.
I dont give a shit what you may say about the current situation, due to the fact that I doubt highly you have tracked politicians through decades.
Let me name two, just for course, actually three...
Dick Cheney.
John McCain.
John Kerry.
What do all of these folks have in common from the mid seventies through the mid nineties... And we wont talk about their personal corruptions... but what ties all three of these scumbags together through the ages?
(let me give you a couple hints... BCCI and the term Khashoggi (or keating) -- Not the dismembered journalist... his older relative)
If you're not aware, and your only argument is one such as yours, Why would I bother?
---
Its your parents' minds that were already lost if you are raised in ignorance... so already two generations behind in your education.
Get lost with apologist sentiments about whats really happening in the US political spectrum.
We know how technology works. We also know how corruption works...
I was even able to use WhatsApp while abroad and my sim card not working for a month, it might be only needed for setting up WhatsApp once at the start and then swap the card.
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...
From the perpective of the guy who posted it, everything's kosher, just nobody's replying for some reason. From the perspective of everyone else in the forum there's no post.
Ostensibly a way of managing spam while depriving the spammer of informative feedback. In practice a method of censorship with extra "screw you" on top.
Some of us express our disagreement with a reply by downvoting and flagging.
HN responds to that by rendering your reply progressively invisible. Throttling your speech. Shadow removal. And shadow ban. (While avoiding responsibility for the censorship, if you see what I mean)
I wish the throttling error would at least tell you when you are able to post again.
Just like not exaplaining reasons for banning what's app account, makin vague TOS, keeping salaries secret, it's the antithesys of a fair and just society.
If anything is an epidemic, it's posts like this one. Sure, each of them has a small chance of being useful to a single individual. At the same time, it's reducing the usefulness of this site for tens or hundreds of thousands. And the more they're encouraged with upvoting and vouching, the more of them will be posted.
I'm tired of billion dollar companies that have achieved their scale by literally hooking us on their free services and have zero interest in us as real people, and then don't give a flying fuck if their shitty automated processes decide to unperson someone.
Then, perchance, we should be using the collective will to name and shame companies so that the source of these posts stops.
The fact that modern companies have taken Kafka's "The Trial" as a playbook instead of a warning is beyond infuriating.
It is unlikely that any count of HN posts will change Facebook's behavior.
The attempt to convert HN into your personal megaphone will, however, ruin HN.
> If anything is an epidemic, it’s posts like this one.
That right there is a good reason to encourage it rather than discourage it, because it indicates a market need. This is exactly the forum to discuss how to address market needs, especially when it comes to cloud services and software, right? I hope, but also expect, that if posts like these get more popular, we will see some actual competition and the problem will begin to rectify itself, which will naturally cause these kinds of threads to diminish. If we suppress these conversations, it may take longer than if we allow it to reach public consciousness.
Just waiting for the inevitable next round of Congressional "What are you going to do about these issues?/Oh we're definitely going to read these legal department-prepared statements that vaguely suggest that we're possibly maybe definitely going to try do something undefined about these issues in the unspecified future."
> ##- WhatsApp Support -## Hi, Our system flagged your account activity as a violation of our Terms of Service and banned your phone number. Your account will remain banned as a result of the violation. We recommend carefully reviewing the “Acceptable Use of Our Services” section of our Terms of Service to learn more about the appropriate uses of WhatsApp and the activities that violate our Terms of Service. You can learn more about how to use WhatsApp responsibly in this Help Center article. Please keep in mind, WhatsApp reserves the right to enforce its policies in accordance with its Terms of Service.
If your friend can help, that'd be great. My email is in profile. Thanks.
> Hi, We have reason to believe your account activity has violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your account banned. We received a large number of complaints about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we won't disclose the nature of the complaints. Unfortunately, responses to this email thread won't be read.
Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually write to anyone besides family and close friends.
Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat as spam.
> Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam.
Each person in that group marked each other as spam? I wonder if other people in that group ended up banned as well.
On Reddit there is this group-stalking phenomenon where if someone (of limited maturity but rich in online contacts who seem to have nothing better to do with their time) for example disagrees with your post, they try to get their friends to get mods to ban you from subreddits by complaining of spam from your account via their inbox/messenger.
Failing that, they usually resort to bombarding Reddit with "concerns" about "wellbeing" which results in inboxes getting cluttered with "A concerned Reddit user reached out to us about your wellbeing" ...
I'm not saying it's that, but human spammers tend to work in networks that respond viciously to anything that messes with accounts they've set up as part of their networks, so if she reported them as spam and they somehow zeroed in on her or suspected her as one of the few possible causes of one of their accounts being flagged for spamming, perhaps they collectively retaliated against her out of spite?
I hope this system is smart enough to only consider complaints from accounts that this user has messaged recently, otherwise, a group of people could decide to maliciously report an account.
But how would they determine this if it is true that they do not store messages on their servers?
So if I get a bunch of bots I could file mass complaints about someone's what''s app account and det them banned?
All you have to do is make a few accounts or convince a few friends and you can remove any video or account on the app that you want.
Considering this thread, it looks like Whatsapp is the same way.
However, all those social networks (including Instagram) are susceptible to another attack - just rent a horde of low-grade bots... and add the victim's account to their friends. This sudden increase in friends count are treated as an attempt to boost the rating of the bot accounts => ban not only for the bots (about whom you don't care) but for the victim too.
Perhaps OP is in the similar situation, though probably his spouse wasn't a target but a collateral.
When it was recommended to me, at first I thought it was a bad joke or something because the first few chapters were so "middle school-ish" in quality.
Towards the end I both wanted to find out what happened next and stop reading altogether because I didn't want the story to end.
The closest thing I found to the experience was the anime Space Dandy where the first few episodes were excruciatingly painful to watch in a "WTF is this crap?!?" disbelief sort of way ... only to progress very quickly to be one of the best entertainment experiences I can remember in a long time.
Unfortunately almost no one seems to care about standards compliance when choosing their messaging app.
I actually can't for the life of me figure out why there's no business model to address this, as it is a common enough type of occurrence on numerous social media platforms; some examples I've personally encountered:
- Friend put in Facebook jail for being tagged in what Facebook found to be an offensive post; people tagged in the post were also put in FB jail, yet ironically the original spamming poster never was
- Friend put in Facebook jail for reporting a clear violation of Facebook's terms of service to Facebook, meanwhile nothing happened to the violator's account
- Myself having been put in FB jail because of a picture of a statue that showed side-boobage; meanwhile "artistic photography" FB pages featuring full, shaven frontal nudity (among other things) were allowed to persist
- Myself having been flagged by FB's "new Ai" during the outbreak of Covid for an "offensive post" ... because I put up a music video that feature zero nudity/sexuality/violence/racism/sexism, yet it supposedly "went against community standards"
- During the period the previous account was flagged by FB Ai, it was flagged again and I got a message that "Our records indicate you were previously flagged in the recent past, and being flagged in the recent past is now a flaggable offense in itself, so we're giving you another month in FB jail"
- While in FB jail, got another message that "I violated the conditions of FB jail (not even sure how this is technically possible) by posting more content "against community standards" (while ALL features of my account were disabled for a month), and so no we're taking this account offline"
Lost EVERYTHING including a contacts list built up over the course of years
Recent Reddit incident where Reddit spam filters mistakenly identified my own posts on my own subreddit that were crosslinked NOWHERE as "spam", resulting in the subreddit being banned (and losing shit-tons of info on the subreddit); Reddit agreed that this was done "in error" but has so far failed to help retrieve any of the lost data on the subreddit ...
Considering how many similar stories I've come across in my research and how important our social media lives/data/contact lists are ...
I would GLADLY either:
1.) Pay a reasonable fee for services with an actual liability clause/customer service contact number OR
2.) Pay for some intermediary service that would take up complaints and find a way to get through to social media companies and be like, "WTF?!?" on behalf of their customers
I'm aware of all the phone number workarounds possible, most of which are VOIP, some of which are using internet hosted real cell phone numbers that forward you access codes, but at this point I can just afford another line. VOIP numbers are getting randomly banned everywhere, and the internet hosted numbers have already been used for a lot of services.
definitely consider just getting a new phone number. they told me to "recognize my privilege" and so, calling all folks with a little financial privilege! get another phone line.
Of course that's going to go bad, for several unavoidable reasons.
Any filtering needs to be managed at the level of me, the guy reading the stuff.
I think this is clear. But maybe I'm wrong.
OP: any chance your wife's phone was sim-swapped or cloned? I believe that this is the only thing that could trigger an alarm.
Also, just drop WhatsApp if you can. Install Element on your phone and ask your wife to do the same, if you want you can sign up for a 14-day trial on Communick [0], or just use the free service from matrix.org [1]
[0]: https://communick.com
[1]: https://app.element.io
Seriously, though. My mother, well in her 60's and far from being a tech-savvy person, managed to install Element and login to her account simply by following the instructions on the email I sent her when I signed her up. The whole thing with saving recovery key is a bit confusing, but not a showstopper.
I don't get why people need to act like they can't even try a different service.There was life before WhatsApp, there can be life without it. Worst case scenario, you tried something new.
You even so much as search for TOR on a search engine, you're on a list.
You go to their site, you're on another list.
You click the "download" part of the page, you're on another list.
You click "download", you're on another list.
You open up the package in your downloads folder, you're on another list.
You install the package contents, you're on another list.
You run it, you're on another list.
People who never gave much thought to who developed TOR and believe it offers "privacy" have got to be among some of the most naive tech users to exist.
I can't help but wonder if "they" didn't start a separate list altogether with his name at the top.
[0] https://www.wksu.org/government-politics/2022-06-02/ohio-hou...
It's totally Trudeau, Canada needs to be closely scrutinized – some very dangerous things have been happening there over the last half-decade or so, and not just in a religious sense.
When a user flags a conversation/user, it sends a number of historical messages with the report. End-to-end encryption doesn't prevent the end user from forwarding the messages to a third party.
His wife uses it not because she wants to necessarily, but because her relatives in OTHER COUNTRIES are on it already.
You'd be surprised how popular WhatsApp is in other areas of the world, especially since it offers peer-to-peer fund transfer.
The problem is not his wife finding an alternative, the problem is finding such an alternative AND convincing all her relatives to install/start using it also.
The only thing that would make that worthwhile for a sizable group of people would be if they could also be able to convince other existing users on their previous platform of choice to ALSO ditch that platform for the new one.
Sort of a catch-22.
Once upon a time, WhatsApp was also a system with a microscopic user base. And AIM, and MSN, and ICQ, Skype...
You have to start somewhere. For me, I told those closer to me that I wanted to get out of WhatsApp and offered to help my immediate family and some friends who wanted to try Element as well. Others said that they were on Telegram, which I am still keeping around, so it was not-ideal-but-acceptable.
The interesting thing happened when there was an outage of Facebook Messenger, and some of my wife's friends got interested in trying out Element too... slow and steady can win this race.
I think the main selling point of WhatsApp in other countries is the peer-to-peer funds transfer feature; family sending each other a bit of money to help get through temporary rough spots is deeply embedded in the cultures of areas of the world where WhatsApp is popular.
What I can't believe (this being run by Y Combinator) is how nobody seems to have come up with a meta-service top-layer; technical objections could be bypassed with a simple "You agree to temporarily waive the encryption capabilities of your core platform while using our platform" disclaimer, and then the meta-service could offer it's own encryption as an alternative.
I'm not saying such a service would be able to duplicate all features of the ones that integrate with it, but ...
I mean it would just make things so much simpler if you could link in your "whatever account" to such a meta service and then just add contact info of others on other services and just be able to speak/chat with them instead of signing up for a multitude of services just to keep in touch with extended family.
I'm sure it's not as technically easy as I made it sound, but I'm also sure there would be a market for that; I can't imagine people who regularly keep in contact with family members dispersed across the world scoffing at a modest monthly fee for such a service, especially since the definition of "modest" would be aimed at U.S./European users who need to keep in contact with family members in other parts of the world.
I've tried sending money overseas with other approaches and was shocked at how fragmented and inconvenient it was compared to things like WhatsApp, etc.
Different services only seem to offer abilities in different countries/markets, some require complicated sign-up processes, others require a ton of information about the receiver, etc.
If sending money is actually important, it doesn't matter if you can do it in the most convenient way possible. It just matters that it is possible.
Ok ... so then ... why do people seem to consistently en masse choose to do it "the most convenient way possible" with things like WhatsApp?
I don't know, it just seems like given the choice between sending money conveniently and sending money inconveniently, they seem to prefer to do so conveniently.
I could be wrong though, maybe WhatsApp flashes subliminal messages directing them to choose WhatsApp to send money.
I did that once when hit with a similar situation with no reason given for refusal of service from a faceless corporation.
The request resulted in a human looking at the situation (because they had to in order to give me my data). They reinstated the service after realising a mistake had been made.
[1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/contact/forms/3022366361353546/
That's the risk we all run when using services owned by others. The unfortunate takeaway is that you cannot trust other people.
How so? I think it's just a realist view. What alternative would you suggest?
It's awful. This is why I would never, ever buy a product that requires a Facebook account to use it (coughOculuscough).
Likewise, I still for the life of me can't figure out why people still use PayPal after the endless "I just logged on and they told me my account and funds were frozen/It's been 6+ months of trying to unfreeze my PayPal funds and still no luck".
Like if there was actual illegal activity, you'd imagine they'd report it (as required by law) and some government entity would freeze the funds; instead PayPal just does so and does who knows what with the money in the meantime, interest-free.
Companies have to earn the right to your custom. If they don't shape up, make them ship out. Remove your custom from their income.
As Vlad said the other day :"You're either sovereign, or you're colonised. There is no other situation." Don't be colonised. Tell all the bastard companies to just piss off.
If it’s worth that much to you, hire an attorney to send a letter demanding an explanation and restoration of service. You’d be surprised what can happen when a company’s legal team gets wind of a problem.
It's doubly frustrating cause she's got quite a bit of money invested in the cosmetic items in the game that she no longer can access.
We've all been robbed.